Critical Reviews

MarkJenkins in the Washington Post, September 10, 2017: Style Section, “In the Galleries” — review of my show Speak to Me at Studio Gallery, Washington, DC:

“Offering an inadvertent contrast to Sarna Marcus’s eggy paintings [discussed earlier in the column], Chris Corson crafts ceramic nudes, all of them clearly male and all but one headless. There’s even a figure that peels open his skin and muscle, splitting his chest like one of Marcus’s fleshy sacs.

“Corson says he focuses on the torso because it ‘shows the essence of who we are.’ Yet the local artist also is intrigued by the surfaces, varied in texture and hue because he employs three firing methods. Most of the skins glimmer with sooty, metallic blacks. One is white, the better to serve as at the billboard for a few choice words from Emma Lazarus’s ‘The New Colossus.’

“The selection includes six large photographs of Corson’s work by Stuart Diekmeyer. Each is different, yet all show the same sculpture, which Corson fired repeatedly to yield different patinas. Without altering the form, the sculptor and his collaborator write a tale of metamorphosis.”

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Jonathan Kamholz in AEQAI, September 23, 2017: “The Place of the Nude” — review of 9th Annual NUDE: Exploring the Uncovered Human Form at Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH:

“It is easier to see what the other sculpture here, Chris Corson’s “Self-Confidence” (2015), is doing in this company. A raku-fired torso, there is something forensic about the piece, which is missing arms, legs, and—of course—head. It ends up being both monumental and mysterious. Like a number of works in the show, it seems allusive to earlier works—it has the prominent, muscular belly of Rodin’s naked, striding Balzac. Interestingly, even with all of the most telling parts missing, it suggests an abbreviated version of a complex self that both can’t be avoided and doesn’t want to be seen.”

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“I am especially drawn to the works of artist Christopher Corson. In Fire and Self-Confidence, I celebrate with Mr. Corson these aged vessels, tested and pushed forward by the heat of transformational experiences, or frozen and crazed by what we hold under our skins, which always bubbles to the surface. The older we get, the more we understand these works, yes?”John Shipman, Executive Director of The Delaware Contemporary, in his juror’s statement for the catalog of Cartes Blanches, a 2016 exhibition of the Washington Sculptors Group.